Read time: 7 min.

Aside from one towering reminder, it’s hard to believe that the Ball Brothers Glass Manufacturing Company once cranked out millions of fruit jars from a seventy-two-acre campus in Muncie. Most of the old facilities, including Ball’s rubber department and laboratory services building, have long since been demolished. Fortunately, I found pictures.

You don’t need to be from Muncie to be familiar with the Ball brothers. You know their name from the cursive script on the product that made them famous if you’ve ever “put up” green beans or pickles. What eventually became Ball Corporation started in 1880, when two of the five brothers bought the Wooden Jacket Can Company in Buffalo. The brothers opened their first glassmaking plant in Muncie in 1888.

Before the introduction of the modern version we know today, Ball’s earliest canning jars featured a variety of innovative closures like tin dust covers, zinc caps, glass lids, and wire bails. The company introduced rubber sealing rings for jars in 1914. Eight years later, it expanded its operations by adding a rubber department to its sprawling facility north of Memorial Drive¹.

The first floor of the fireproof, steel-frame structure originally housed a machine shop. The second story of the building -which featured a concrete roof and brick curtain wall- was home to the company’s rubber lathe department and laboratory.  A 14,000-square-foot standalone rubber warehouse was added to the southwest in 1933².

By 1955, the rubber department building connected to a welding and pattern shop to the north and a new machine shop nearby. It also attached to corporate offices via a skyway over a Muncie & Western Railroad spur to the east³. Around the same time, Ball started a subsidiary research laboratory. The Muncie branch focused on R&D in the glass, plastics, zinc, rubber, and canning closure segments⁴. 

In 1962, Ball Brothers stunned Muncie by announcing it would shutter its thirty-acre glass factories due to economic factors that included their age, layout, and higher costs than incurred at its eleven other glass facilities⁵. The decision led to the loss of 600 jobs when the last Muncie-made glass came off the line at 5:03 a.m. on March 19, 1962⁶.

Despite the enormous loss, Ball still maintained a presence in Muncie. The company’s zinc mill, metal products plants, offices, maintenance department, and research laboratories remained in business amidst the abandoned furnaces and lehrs. Ball initially claimed it would keep its shuttered facilities well-maintained⁷, but ultimately wasted little time demolishing most of its campus.

Ball Brothers moved on from rubber jar closures to plastisol in 1968, a year before the company renamed itself Ball Corporation. I gather that’s when the rubber department was converted to the lab services building full-time. I know for certain that the old rubber warehouse at the corner of South Blaine and East 9th Street was retrofitted to manufacture plastisol around then, just before the “cold end” of Factory 1 was redesigned to become a closure plant in 1970. 

By 1992, Ball’s laboratory services building was home to a centralized team that traveled to other company facilities to monitor environmental compliance and perform related tests⁸. A year later, Ball spun off seven of its businesses to form Alltrista Corporation. One of the separated companies was Ball’s consumer products division, which continued to operate the laboratory and market Ball-branded home-canning products like jars, lids, and bands.

Unfortunately, the laboratory services building wasn’t long for this world. Along with Ball’s 1913 zinc stamping works, the building was demolished soon after Alltrista sold its plastic packaging division to Spartech Corporation in 1999⁹. Both were landmarks. Thankfully, someone was wise to take photos of the destruction so they weren’t completely forgotten.

Tracking Ball spin-offs is complicated, but Alltrista became Jarden Corporation in 2002. Jarden merged with Newell-Rubbermaid in 2015 to form Newell Brands. Believe it or not, Newell still makes lids and bands in part of Factory 1 on the old Ball Brothers campus! The company uses other leftover facilities on the campus for storage and maintenance, but not the demolished zinc works or lab services buildings. The quality lab was relocated to Building 66, which served as a guard shack, the Ball Employees Credit Union, and a marketing office over the years.

Many are familiar with the history of the Ball brand. I worked for Jarden and Newell in four roles over two stints that spanned six years! In 2011, I was hired to answer emails as part of Jarden Home Brands’ consumer affairs department and quickly moved to the brand management team. As the marketing team’s unofficial historian, I learned all there was to know about the history of the Mason jar and the Ball Blue Book.

A few years after the merger, I returned to the fold as a Quality Analyst at the closure plant and, later, acting operations supervisor. There, I learned all I could about the factory’s physical history. I explored every nook and cranny in my idle hours, and even flew my drone around. I stumbled across the images I shared on a slow Sunday morning and was given permission to scan them.

When I was a kid, physical reminders of Ball’s heritage seemed few and far between. I was shocked to learn that sixteen old Ball Brothers buildings remain standing in southeastern Muncie! Newell Brands still owns ten of them, and Spartech uses three. Beyond the ubiquitous canning jars still sold in stores and the family’s ongoing philanthropy, many examples of the Ball Brothers’ history remain around town. It’s just a shame that the old rubber department and lab services building is no longer a part of the legacy.

Sources Cited
1 Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Muncie, Delaware County, Indiana (1955). Sanborn Map Company, ; Republished 1954 Vol. 1. Map.
2 Delaware County Office of Information & GIS Services. (2024). Parcel ID: 1115481001000. Delaware County, Indiana Assessor. map, Muncie, IN.
3 (See footnote 1).
4 Ball Research Director Tells Kiwanis of Work (1960, May 11). The Muncie Star. p. 5. 
5 Ball Brothers to Shut Down Glass Tanks (1962, January 14). The Muncie Star. p. 1. 
6 Last Glass Is Produced at Ball Factory (1962, March 20). The Muncie Evening Press. p. 2. 
7 (See footnote 5).
8 Accident Free (1992, March 13). The Muncie Star. p. 19. 
9 Cheesman, M. (1999, May 6). Alltrista to sell Muncie packaging division. The Muncie Star Press. p. 1.